Housing (Pharaoh)
Housing is a game mechanic found in . Just like with , housing is placed generically and can be evolved in manors and estates when provided with the needed commodities. Background Housing act as homes for the population of the city. As no city can operate without people, housing are essential for any scenario. When housing is initially placed, they are simple vacant plots. Like most other buildings, these plots must be within two tiles of a Road to function properly. Once a valid plot is placed, immigrants arrive from the entry point of the map (the beginning of the kingdom road) and enter the housing. Once housing is occupied, it takes the form of a crude hut. Housing is initially run-down and primitive, but improves with access to goods, services, and desirability. Improved housing holds many advantages: they have decreased risk to fire (after a certain level is reached), disease, malaria, and crime, can hold more people per unit of space, generate higher tax income, raise the desirability of the neighborhood, and boost the prosperity level of a city. In order for housing to have access to services, they simply require a walker from the service they need to walk within two tiles of them. In order for housing to receive goods and food, they require the service of Bazaars that have access to properly-stocked Granaries and Storage Yards. As stated above, housing has many risks: crime, malaria, disease, and fire. Risks of these occurring almost always decrease the further houses are upgraded. The one exception to this is fire: risk increases up until ordinary cottages, before falling all the way up to and including palatial estates. Housing is initially undesirable in and of itself. However, as housing upgrades, the negativity of its desirability diminishes until it becomes positive. At the highest levels, housing are very desirable, although they invariably need desirable buildings placed around them in order to evolve in the first place. Housing come in many varieties and sizes. When a house evolves to a 3x3 tile size or larger, it ceases providing labor. Instead, it begins generating scribes and a tremendous amount of tax revenue. The revenue is such that in properly developed cities, tax income can easily outstrip export income. However, building too many 3x3 and 4x4 housing can result in severe labor shortages. A list of the levels of housing and their requirements are listed below: * the last level of housing that can be 1x1 in size. ** the last level of housing that can be 2x2 in size. All houses after this do not generate workers. ***the last level of housing that can be 3x3 in size. Strategy Due to the fact that higher levels of housing require multiple goods and services and that losing access to any of these cause devolution to the next lowest level, housing quality can fluctuate greatly if placed haphazardly (in the most extreme example, a palatial estate can devolve to a crude hut within a very short period of time if it loses access to water). Most successfully built cities therefore ensure that its housing are afforded constant coverage of goods and services. One of the most efficient ways to do this is to create a "block"--a looped road that contains (both within and outside the loop) housing and the goods and services they need. Looped roads ensure that random walkers always follow a set path, in turn ensuring that housing always benefits from their services. Larger loops naturally can hold more housing, although blocks that are too large (longer than 44 tiles in circumference) can be subject to instability as walkers can only walk so far before returning to their buildings. Loops hold other advantages aside from promoting stable housing. They allow players to precisely control the evolution of housing in sections of their city by allowing or disabling certain goods and services. Housing is generally better placed on the outside of the loop--this way, other industries can draw labor by walking near the block (as long as citizens walk within two tiles of a house). Buildings do not draw workers from just the houses its labor seekers come across. Once a building has access to housing, it has access to the entire city' population of workers. Category:Pharaoh: Buildings